EYEING UP NEW ARRIVALS AT Bradford Interchange station is a full-length photograph of J.B. Priestley, one of the city's most famous sons. He is dressed in full Priestley uniform — pipe, trilby, belted overcoat — and has a characteristically canny glint in his eye. The picture must have been taken 20 years or so after he returned to Bradford in 1933 for his English Journey, that forerunner of Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier, but with more comfortable hotels.

Priestley found a city with “a carved-out-of-the-Pennines look... entirely without charm, though not altogether ugly” and noticed many changes since his childhood, with “new streets where once there were old pubs and shops”.

What would he say if he could go back today? Would he echo the architectural critic Gavin Stamp in Britain's Lost Cities, an engrossing, no-punches-pulled denunciation of the wilful destruction of our urban landscape since the 1930s? Stamp describes today's Bradford, one of the 19 cities whose fate he chronicles, as a pale shadow of “the dense, complex and lively pre-war city recorded in old photographs”. Seething with elegant outrage, he hits out at planners who have vandalised so much of its almost exclusively Victorian fabric.

They sent in the bulldozers and wrecking balls, replacing arcades, markets and warehouses with buildings that were either dreary or dreadful and which systematically squandered the city's dignity. “As in other cities,” he writes, “the inadequate and unnecessary postwar rebuilding of Bradford now seems a criminal waste of money, energy and materials.”

Stamp's thesis is familiar, but it has rarely been so combatively expressed. He tours the country from Dundee to Plymouth, via Liverpool, Bristol, Norwich, Portsmouth, London and others, hurling abuse at engineers, developers and politicians.

Until the 20th century, he points out, change in cities “tended to be piecemeal, occasional and organic”, even though Victorian railway companies ruthlessly slashed their lines through anything in their path.

The religion of the motor car changed all that. Councils dismembered their cities to build ring roads, flyovers and car parks. They used any excuse for demolition — that old buildings had a limited life; that Victorian architecture was at best unfashionable, at worst sinfully ugly; that the mess left by Luftwaffe raids needed tidying up.

The Nazis became convenient scapegoats for plans already under way. Coventry's medieval Butcher Row was razed in 1936, four years before the first bombers flew in. It had become, the Lord Mayor sniffed, “a blot on the city”. Planners in Canterbury welcomed the wartime destruction and set about their own.

Naming names, Stamp tells a tale of neglect, incompetence, philistinism and sheer bloody-minded malice, encapsulated in a comment by Herbert Manzoni, the City Engineer and Surveyor of Birmingham from 1935 to 1963: “I have never been very certain as to the value of tangible links with the past,” he said in 1957. “As to Birmingham's buildings, there is little of real worth in our architecture. Its replacement should be an improvement, provided we keep a few monuments as museum pieces to past ages.”

City after city was blighted with modernist buildings that, in an almost totalitarian way, were obsessed with function and efficiency and often looked like multistorey car parks, even when they weren't.

Nowhere suffered more than Newcastle, where the council leader, T.Dan Smith, a friend of “that corrupt architect” John Poulson, announced a vision of his city as “the Milan of the North”. As Stamp balefully notes: “What he achieved... was more like the Croydon of the North.”

Here and elsewhere, conservationists protested, but, despite such successes in the 1960s as the rescue of StPancras station in London (the subject of great jubilation recently), it was only in the 1970s that they really began to make an impact.

By then irreparable damage had been done. Keith Waterhouse summed things up in 1975 in two sentences that will resonate with anyone who has ever sat narcoleptically through a local council meeting: “I would put most of the blame on the councillors who invite and encourage the laying-waste of their own townships. The trouble is that many of them are not very bright.”

Their legacy is the desperate sense of loss engendered by Stamp's book, with its 200 stylishly presented archive photographs. I lost count of the number of pictures of smart, historic, charming streets captioned: “Every building in this photograph has since disappeared.”

In Bradford, it is often hard to find a reference point for many of the pictures. Step out of the Interchange station (“tawdry” in Stamp's opinion) and you are overwhelmed by an urban motorway, sending pedestrians trudging over bridges or through underpasses smelling of urine.

A city centre once packed with handsomely heavyweight buildings has had its Victorian integrity gradually picked apart, as though in a death wish or out of the “self-hatred for their industrial past” shared by many Northern cities.

The frontispiece of Stamp's book shows Darley Street, Bradford, where the Kirkgate Market, with its welcoming human scale, was demolished in 1973, despite protests by Priestley and his fellow-Bradfordian David Hockney. Its replacement is a shopping mall of awesome brutalism.

Not all is lost, however. The city's spirit survives, bracing and businesslike. Lister's Mill, once the world's biggest silk factory (“as breathtaking as Versailles,” The Times once said) has a bright, ambitious future converted into smart apartments and offices.

The sturdy warehouses of the Little Germany area, great cliff faces of buff stone with sculpted eagles glowering from parapets, are being regenerated. The Wool Exchange, with its friezes of bewhiskered wool-industry worthies, has become the grandest of Waterstone's bookstores.

And the refurbishment of the Great Victoria Hotel is recapturing much of its former confidence. Here at least, Priestley's ghost would be happy, thumbs hooked in waistcoat pockets, propping up the bar, chuntering for England.

Britain's Lost Cities by Gavin Stamp
Aurum, £25; 186pp

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